A near-to-eye (or near-eye) display is a wearable device that creates a display in front of the user's field of vision. The display may be transparent or opaque, depending on the application. For example, a transparent display can overlay information and graphics on top on the real world, while an opaque display can provide an immersive theater-like experience.
Near-to-eye Displays can be broadly placed in two categories, immersive and see-through. Immersive near-to-eye displays block a user's view of the real world and create a large field of view image, typically 30°-60° degrees for cinema glasses and 90°+ degrees for virtual reality displays. See-through near-to-eye displays leave the user's view of the real world open and create either a transparent image or a very small opaque image that blocks only a small portion of the user's peripheral vision. The see-through category can be broken down into two applications, augmented reality and smart glasses. Augmented reality headsets typically offer 20°-60° degree fields of view and overlay information and graphics on top of the user's view of the real world. Smart glasses, which is really a misnomer, in contrast typically have a smaller field of view and a display at which the user glances periodically rather than looking through the display continuously.
It would be beneficial for such near-to-eye displays to exploit image content based upon depth information within the image and/or generate depth maps of the environment of the user allowing images presented to the user to enhance the user's visual stimuli. It would be further beneficial for such enhancements to be compatible with the evolving low weight, low volume, low complexity, and low cost near-to-eye display systems can be provided to users, both with normal vision or with low-vision. It would be further beneficial to provide a user with other non-visual stimuli based upon depth information within the image.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.